The Lightning Thief on the big screen

**loads of spoilers, of book and film, ahead**

The first time we see Percy Jackson on screen in the film adaptation of The Lightning Thief, he is sitting underwater, mostly naked. Initially, because we only see him from mid-torso up, I was afraid he was actually naked, and that we were seeing some kind of odd dream sequence/birth memory. Instead, we were just getting a very unsubtle Poseidon/water allusion, and some teen-boy pinup cinematography.

Both of these seem to sum up the flaws with the movie: a total lack of subtlety in every way, and shameless, relentless catering to the teen-magazine set.

I like Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series; they're clever, they're fast-paced, they tell a good story with some really appealing characters (love that Nico Di Angelo). And in quite a few subtle ways, they move against the grain of your traditional hero-on-a-quest books (most especially H. Potter).

The film doesn't do these things. At all.

Instead, it relies on some very tired cliches and does the typical Hollywood move of sweetening up children's books into children's films by killing off the subtlety and anything complex or prickly. In this case, the most egregious is the sappy way Poseidon is figured as Percy's loving dad, restrained unwillingly by Zeus's unfair decree from becoming "more human" and staying with Percy and his mom. One of the strongest moments of the book is the first meeting between Poseidon and Percy, when Percy appreciates his father's honesty; they have a mutual wariness of each other, and, as Percy says, his dad doesn't try to make any "lame excuses." But the film makes the lame excuses, and makes them over and over again.

Being a hero, a demigod, is a raw deal in the world of the books. Your life is in peril, you are a guaranteed single-parent family, you have peculiar abilities and disabilities that make life very difficult (ADHD and dyslexia, and that ability to attract deadly monsters). You are either a pawn or a cast-off of the gods, and all of the demigods in the books have to wrestle with what this means for them.

Not so the film, which tries (and fails) to be clever and hip while also maintaining a family-friendly sentimentality.

Logan Lerman, aged 17, plays Percy; Lerman was clearly chosen for his looks and not his acting "ability." He seems to have studied every Zac Efron film ever made, and then patterned himself after Efron but - and I never thought I'd say it -  without Efron's talent. He poses, he crinkles his eyes, giving off an air of disbelieving confused pain, regardless of that actual emotion the scene demands. The film's Percy also has confidence to burn; he gets flashy with the sword, flourishing it around and doing a bit of hot-dogging after successful battles.  Grover gets bumped up to a lecherous satyr with mad martial arts skills with his crutches - and never a single reference to Pan or nature. It's all about "getting his horns," which - of course - he does after being stuck briefly in the Underworld with the equally lecherous Persephone.

The shift of the characters' ages allows for a bunch of tedious googly-eyes between a dark-haired Annabeth and Percy, and for vaguely disturbing and creepy sexual innuendo between Grover and a swath of females. On this same angle, the movie really drives home the inevitable omnipresence of the phallus (you can't escape this in any fantasy film). Percy's sword, obviously, but he also ends up with a trident at one point, and that lightning bolt - oh jeez.  Medusa, played pretty well by Uma Thurman (and wearing a killer outfit) slinks up to Percy, saying "I hear you have the....lightning bolt. May I see it?" in her best seductive voice. And it really does not seem like she's talking about Zeus's master bolt.  Annabeth, at the film's end, seems to be leaning in for a kiss, but instead grabs Percy's sword (no, the actual sword Riptide) away from him, in a weirdly erotic/castrating move.

There are other creepy sexualized moments, ones devoid of other kinky humor or any real erotics. Gabe slaps Sally's ass, causing Percy to object; at another scene, Percy and Grover burst in during one of the poker games, when Gabe says: "Can't you see she's servicing me and my friends?"
Persephone, in the Underworld, is about four threads short of being dressed only in lingerie, and she is most definitely a sexual predator; her first words are "I've never had a satyr. ...... as a visitor."
Annabeth comes upon Percy sitting on the bottom of a pool (thankfully wearing his boxers or some such); then follows a scene practically ripped from Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, but culminating in a very erotically charged moment when Percy transfers healing powers from the water to Annabeth's injured arm.
I'm all for throwing in desire and erotics, but in this film it felt flat-out creepy. Percy gets all excited from the first moment he sees Annabeth, and the two of them are set to duel it out with knives and swords from the outset.

The plot has been reorganized from the quest of the book to a search for "Persephone's Pearls" - magical objects that will enable the three questers to leave the Underworld. Setting aside the fact that "Persephone's Pearls" sounds - frankly - like a sex toy, having such a highly structured quest, along with a map and the ability to drive a truck they've stolen, takes away a lot of the pleasure of discovery and adventure that the book delivers.

Camp Half-Blood has been refigured from a valley on Long Island to something that looks terrifyingly like a cross between Sherwood Forest and Renaissance Faire - even Luke makes a derogatory allusion to the camp's RenFaire tone. The demigods, all clad in bronzey greek armor (all the time, except the girls, of course; they get thin dresses. Annabeth is the exception, but her armor is decidedly well-endowed), racket around with bow-and-arrows and swords like Robin Hood's Merry Men in a heavily wooded forest set among moutains (the film's credits reveal that part of the movie was shot in Vancouver, and I would bet money that Camp Half-Blood is actually in the mountains of British Columbia). The campers don't wear their orange camp shirts, and their "cabins" are more like open-air pavilions. It feels like RenFaire and not summer camp.

The adults in the movie are disappointments across the board, except Hades and Medusa. The actors playing Poseidon and Zeus aren't at their best, and what's worse, they get rendered in horrible special effects that end up making us feel like we're watching a cheap version of Gulliver's Travels or Darby O'Gill and the Little People.  The special effects were terrible in a movie that cries out for excellent effects; only the lightning at the film's beginning and end was effective. Percy is able to use the flying shoes to terrible visual effect - it felt a little like watching a low-budget community theatre production of Peter Pan. Luke and Percy battle it out at the end while wearing the winged shoes (black Chuck Taylors, of course) in a singularly poorly conceived change.

The complex relations among the gods and demigods - Ares, Hades, Poseidon, Percy, Zeus, Luke, Hermes - are almost completely erased or subordinated. Ares never appears; we see a half-second shot of Hermes, but get a fair bit of the toothy Luke's rantings about his crappy father. But Luke is a solo actor in the theft of the master bolt; no hints of Kronos rising, or anything deeper or broader.

One thing that did make me happy, in a wry sort of way, was the film's inclusion of the Lotus Hotel and Casino. My fall class almost unanimously disliked the Lotus scenes, and many of them, in an assignment proposing a film adaptation, eliminated the scene entirely. I never quite understood their dislike of the scene - I think it's actually a pretty clever device. Of course, the film turns it into real Vegas casino glitz, with all kinds of sexy girls revealing a LOT of cleavage, roulette and craps tables, Grover in a spa surrounded by giggling girls, a dance floor (and Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" song) and Percy and Annabeth leaning against the bar while Grover dances with his girls. And - in just one more instance of the tedious unsubtlety of the film, they actually eat lotus flowers that they're given by cocktail waitresses. The lotuses act as a memory-erasing quasi-aphrodesiac which also mimics acid and/or pot - Annabeth is overcome with giggles, Grover gets all kinds of pouncy, Percy goes giggly and dreamy.

I have seen worse films; last summer's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, for example, was far more tedious and painful to watch than The Lightning Thief. It's hard to say if the movie was any good, because - and this is my critical failing here - I was so unable to separate it from the book(s). I don't think the movie retains much of the tone of the books - that subtlety or wit, or the genuine complexity of the relationships between characters. I suspect that, if I hadn't read the books, I'd have thought the movie was okay, although action/adventure is not my speed at all. The kids in the audience (and the audience was tiny when I saw the movie in mid-afternoon on a weekday) were pretty enthusiastic about it; I walked behind a couple of them from the theater to my car (by chance, not intentionally), and the kids were excited and enthused, talking about which parts they liked best and giving the movie an "A".

What bothers me the most is that Riordan's book is absolutely ripe for cinematic adaptation - there's action, there's complexity, there's mystery, discovery, peril, humor, even some romance. It's all there. Instead, Hollywood (via its screenwriter Craig Titley, who doesn't seem to have done much else worth noting), waters it down and sweetens it up, taking any unconventional or original elements and either erasing them entirely, or altering them so greatly that they become trite.  This happens all the time - books which kids LOVE, books which are undeniable best-sellers - get muddled into something far less interesting or appealing in some misguided belief that adhering to the source text will result in poor ticket sales. It's partly pandering to the adults who have to take the kids to the film - you can leave an 8-year-old alone with a novel, but you probably won't drop him at the movie theatre for two hours - and some foolish, pop-cultural idea of what children need/want/should have, but it's also just a simple flat lack of imagination and inventiveness.

This lack of inventiveness, I think, is why all the previews were for adaptations: a remake of The Karate Kid (relocated to China, starring Jackie Chan and Will Smith's son - wtf?); an adaptation of Diary of a Wimpy Kid (ugh!), and an M. Night Shyamalan-scripted adaptation of the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender. Not an original screenplay among them.

So The Lightning Thief disappointed as an adaptation, but provides lots and lots of fodder for thinking and talking about how adaptations work (or don't work, as the case may be).  It seems unlikely - given the way the film ends - that future installments of the Percy Jackson series will be adapted to film, which is probably a very good thing, although it would be interesting to see what a really good screenwriter and director could do with, say, Nico Di Angelo, or the Labyrinth. It would have been more interesting to see what a really good screenwriter and director could have done with The Lightning Thief.

Golden Compass: film edition

I saw The Golden Compass. And.....

Well. As I alluded to - and will probably allude to for the rest of my life, since it was so awesome - I met Philip Pullman in late October. I asked him for his opinion of the film, and he very diplomatically replied thus: the casting and performances were great, and the look of the film was terrific.

I have to say: I concur with Mr Pullman on this one.

The look of the film was utterly dreamy. A gorgeous, steampunky, Victorianesque world - zeppelins, and an amazing carriage, and Lee Scoresby's balloons, and the clothing. Lyra's Oxford looks more or less the way I always imagined it - like my own experience of Oxford, which was roughly 12 jet-lagged hours in late summer, golden and dreamy and glowing and mysterious.

The casting, and the acting, is TO DIE FOR. Really, I don't think I could have done better if I'd been in charge. Sam Elliott is perhaps the best: he IS Lee Scoresby. and Kathy Bates voices the laconic Hester to perfection. Dakota Blue Richards, who plays Lyra (and has been spoken extremely highly of by Mr Pullman himself) was great as Lyra. A little sneery, a lot bold, a little afraid, a lot wary - she's a great Lyra. I particularly love that she is not too refined, too clean, too pretty, too made up (as Emma Watson is, as Hermione). She LOOKS like she could be Lyra. My Lyra isn't quite so narrow of face, but Dakota Richards has knocked this one out of the ballpark.

And then Ms Kidman, Nicole herself, as everyone's most frightening villainess: Mrs Coulter. The CGI golden monkey is a true horror, really scary and creepy. Kidman has always been my perfect casting choice for this part, and she really is astonishingly Coulteresque. There was a bit more coldness and glamour, and not enough sweetness, but otherwise: lovely.
Daniel Craig as Asriel is an acceptable decision, but he gets way too much screen time. Likewise, Eva Green makes a lovely Serafina Pekkala, though I always pictured her as fair-haired, but felt a little too stagey at one or two moments. The gyptians were pretty great, though John Faa was less dignified, and Farder Coram less frail, than in the text.

Iorek Byrnison is another marvel of CGI work, but I cannot feel great about Ian McKellen voicing him. McKellen's a marvellous actor with a wonderful voice, but there's something a little too slushy for Iorek. Iorek's voice ought to be clean, deep, sharp, cutting. At times, McKellen sounds just a bit too slushily old for the part.

The actual story - well, I knew they'd take liberties, but frankly, I'm DEVASTATED by the conclusion. The permanence of the intercision is glossed over, and the interiors of Bolvangar made me think of Tim Burton's Charlie & the Chocolate Factory in a way that jarred rather unpleasantly. Characters are collapsed, or removed: Martin Lanselius, the consul at Trollesund, disappears, and the information he reveals is instead told by Scoresby and Serafina. I've always been very partial to that chapter of the book - the consul and the bear - but I can see why this needed doing. The Magisterium becomes much more of a presence, in a very unnecessary way, and we get a very dumb extended scene of Asriel being captured, in which he comes off as something much less than the strong, authoritative, proud man he really ought to be.

But the film is truly beautiful to look at. It can't help that NO film could ever capture the lyricism and emotional truth of the novel. How could any image say : "That was intercision, and this was a severed child"? How could any image convey the heartbreaking horror of Lyra's encounter of Tony Makarios in that fish-house? Or the complicated, bewildering themes of Iofur Raknisson's wish to be what he is not? (Iofur gets a name change, by the way - he becomes Ragnur or something, I suppose to avoid aural confusion with Iorek).

The golden compass itself is perhaps my LEAST favorite part. Lyra's ability to read the alethiometer comes slowly, gradually, with work - that chapter is titled "Frustration." It brings with it responsibility, weariness and awe, all of which the film dispenses with. Everyone continually refers to it as The Golden Compass, which is merely a descriptor in the text, not a name it's known by. And the gimmick of golden swirling d(D)ust as Lyra deciphers the alethiometer was appalling. Part of why the alethiometer works as a literary device is that it is mysterious; Lyra goes into a trance, and we NEVER know what she's seeing until she attempts to verbalize it. I've never imagined her readings to be a series of images, but something more....ephemeral. impressions, feelings, senses, not photographs.

The film's ending is a travesty. that is all i shall say about that. If new line decides to film the following two books, I should like to be Creative Consultant. I can't quite see how they'll dig themselves out of the ending satisfactorily, but - hey. who knows? in hollywood, anything is possible. I think a more sensitive director would have done a better job - someone more attuned to the glory of the book(s).

I do have to say, when Iorek and Iofur/Ragnur fight, and Iorek wins, the audience I watched with broke into applause and cheers.

I really will stick with the books on this one: they have an elegance, a beauty and a truth that no film could ever translate.

order of the phoenix - movie montage madness!

so i surprised myself by being very eager to see the film adaptation of Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix. surprised, because though I am just as addicted to the books as the next person, I've been vastly disappointed with the films. But I've become, in the last year or so, VERY attached to Phoenix (the book), and I really quite wanted to see how the director (David Yates, who has far as I can tell, hasn't done much of real note before) dealt with it.

Yates seems to have been an excellent choice - there were a lot of small visual details, and cinematographic decisions that I really, really liked. lots of weird, rapid zoom-in close-ups of fragmented body parts - an eye, a neck - that really gave the film a nice spooky tone without being over the top or horror-movie-ish.

Imelda Staunton does a KICK-ASS job as Dolores Umbridge. Her costumes were perfect; she nailed the smiley pinkish evil of Umbridge perfectly. her desire for power is brilliantly staged - one scene has her seated in a throne-like chair, overseeing an exam or lesson. the way she briefly caresses the arm of the throne is genius.

one other genius move: in the final scenes of the film, in the Ministry, we see an enormous portrait banner of Fudge - it's a touch right out of, say, 1984 or any other film about dictators. It's such a brief touch but so brilliantly frames the politics of the movie - i cheered when i saw it.

Also, and I feel hideously creepy saying this, but my friend (with whom I saw the film) said it first: Daniel Radcliffe is going to be one extremely handsome young man. and soon. (although the ringer t-shirt/corduroy hipster/intellectual look he sports in the final scene could go).

I still loathe Emma Watson as Hermione Granger; she's simply NOT hermione. The actor playing Ginny would make a much better Hermione; she has a less glamourous prettiness. The film keeps wanting to make Hermione a Leading Lady, but the stories just don't permit that, so every glowy scene with Watson seems forced. And - sorry, Emma - but she just doesn't look smart.

Helena Bonham Carter is PERFECT as Bellatrix, and stole every scene she's in. I wish she was in it more, somehow.

Evanna Lynch, a fangrrrl who was cast as my favorite character in the whole series, Luna Lovegood, was incredible. Totally dreamy, totally Luna. I wish she had more screen time.

NOW! Let's rip the film to shreds! Keep in mind that of the films in the HP series, this was by far the one I'm most pleased with.

An acquaintance very astutely observed on Monday that they'd need to make two films per book (especially after Azkaban) to really do the books justice. The amount of STUFF in the novels simply cannot be squeezed into a 2+ hour movie. Recognizing this limitation is essential, I think, to having any kind of objective reaction to the films.

The main criticism of this film: to cram everything into 2 hours - everything required to set up the next installment - Yates & co decided to produce a series of montages, rather than a solid block of narrative film. There's remarkably little dialogue. Things happen very, very quickly, and in montage - one of my favorite parts of the book, the St Mungo's chapters, are eliminated altogether. Within about four minutes, Harry has:
seen the snake attack Mr Weasley
been whisked off for Occlumency with Snape
gone on christmas holiday
Mr Weasley returns home cured

it happens rapidfire, montage style.
The DA sessions also run in montage, as do the series of Educational Decrees and Umbridge's inspections of the teachers.

We SEE a lot happen in a short space of time, but never really experience it. The film has virtually no interiority; there's a weak-ass attempt early on, when Harry writes a diarylike letter to Sirius, talking about how sad and alone he feels. Harry's estrangement and persecution by the Wizard community - the awkwardness at school, his sense of alienation from everyone, his anger (ALL CAPS HARRY, WHERE ARE YOU???) are almost completely absent in the film. They're gestured at - he snaps at Ron and Hermione a bit, but the real angst is just....gone.

In my humble opinion, they blew it with the Ministry - it's a hightech 21st century-looking black and glass underground city, not the peacock blue and jewel-toned ministry i imagined. it has the look of being built in a subway stop (and in fact the credits thank and cite Westminster tube stop as a location), and feels creepy in all the wrong ways.

The details of the Ministry - especially the Department of Mysteries - is absent. Harry finds his way into the hall of prophecy instantly; there is none of that spooky blue-black lighting, no Time Room. They don't stumble into the Death Chamber (with the Veil) until after retrieving the prophecy.

I think these absences matter. In teaching Azkaban this summer, (the novel), one of the things that seemed evident to me through our discussions is that the wealth of detail - the fullness and depth of the fantasy world Rowling creates - is perhaps THE major reason why so many people are so passionate about the books. It is a deeply, thoroughly realized Other World. There are spellcheck quills and magical socks. there are self-peeling potatoes and family-vehicle flying carpets (or were, before the ban on them). there are things we can't imagine: the beautiful, glittering belljar, with the hummingbird in its stream - the jar of TIME - in the department of Mysteries; the myriad ailments in St Mungo's ER; the very entrance to Purge & Dowse, Ltd (in Regent Street). The magical parallels of real-world life are what make the books so enthralling. we want to live in that world, and it's so vividly created that we almost believe it exists.

The films fail us in this respect. The richness of the fantasy world is lost, and instead we have this weirdly fakey juxtaposition of magical world and muggle - this is perhaps most cringeably noticeable when harry and the order fly on broomsticks to Grimmauld Place, in London - the "flying broomsticks" look so fake against their bluescreen backdrop of 2006 London. the Magic doesn't seem REAL, in the films, and so it disppoints.

The feel-good moments of emotion between Sirius and Harry, Dumbledore & Harry, and Harry, Ron and Hermione feel like crap, though. It's the problem virtually ALL children's texts suffer when they are transmediated for the big screen: we can't have gritty, subversive, grotesque or subtle emotions. The darkness of the film vanishes in this hopeful conclusion, with harry feeling good about what's worth fighting for. he's too heroic in the most cliched way possible, and too inspirational. Not much about Harry Potter, the character, is truly inspirational. But the film forces him into that position, and again: it grates and jars against the rest of the narrative. The novel does not end on an especially uplifting or hopeful note; the film tries to, and that's when it suffers most.

But i did love some of the staging and cinematography; the Weasley twins are marvellous, as always; Luna and Bellatrix and Umbridge are brilliant casting decisions.